


A Little Dutch Girl Dressed in Blue

by language_escapes



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Child Death, Gen, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 02:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1411465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan was a Double Dutch champion as a kid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Dutch Girl Dressed in Blue

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "Joan, Sherlock, Childhood". Originally posted on my tumblr.
> 
> The title comes from an old jump rope song:
> 
> I'm a little Dutch girl dressed in blue,  
> Here are the things I like to do.  
> Salute the Captain,  
> Curtsy to the queen,  
> Turn my back on a big submarine!
> 
> Warnings: they are investigating the death of a child.

“She skipped Double Dutch,” Joan says, looking at their small victim with a soft frown. She’s far too young to be on a morgue slab, and even though Joan operated on her share of children who had knife wounds or gunshot wounds, it never gets any easier.

“What?” Sherlock asks, looking up from his examination of the jagged gash across her abdomen.

“She skipped Double Dutch,” she repeats, gesturing at the girl. Jane Doe. No one has identified her yet. From the look of her clothes and her hands, Joan suspects that they’ll need to head to the homeless shelters to ID her. Maybe ask some of Teddy’s friends.

Sherlock waves his hand impatiently at her. “Once more, in English,” he says, his tone sharp. She ignores it. He likes to pretend that all of the death they see doesn’t bother him, but it does, and it’s always worse when it’s a kid. He goes sharp, she goes quiet. They both have their ways of coping.

“It’s a game,” she explains. “Jumping rope, except there are two ropes. We used to play it on my block. I was the Double Dutch champion in my neighbourhood.”

“How can you tell?” he asks, moving around the slab to stand by her side. She gestures at the girl’s hands.

“Look at the calluses. You get those from turning the ropes. The musculature in her arms and shoulders and calves is also consistent with someone who skips a lot of Double Dutch. And her shoes had some distinctive wear on them. My sneakers used to wear out every few months when I skipped Double Dutch, in the same spots as hers.”

“I see,” Sherlock says, although it’s obvious he doesn’t.

“Do you not have Double Dutch in England?” she asks. “I’m pretty sure there are international tournaments now.”

He rolls his shoulders back, picking up the girl’s hand and examining the calluses closely. “I’m sure we do, but skipping rope has never been a past time that I paid much attention to. You were good at it?”

“Yeah,” Joan says, nodding. “It was what I did after school, and on weekends.”

“When you weren’t studying up on the Mafia.”

“When I wasn’t studying up on the Mafia.”

Sherlock hums in interest, but she can’t tell if it’s about what she said, or something about the girl’s hands has caught his eye. Joan crosses her arms and thinks for a moment. When she was a kid, skipping Double Dutch made you instantly recognizable to all the other girls in the neighbourhood. She’s pretty sure she could still name all the Double Dutchers from her childhood without hesitation. There were girls from the next neighbourhood over who knew who she was, and used to dare her to come and skip Double Dutch with them, to see if she really was as good as she thought. Joan never took them up on it- her mother would have killed her if she hadn’t come right home after school- but she’d been tempted.

“You know,” she says slowly, “if she skipped Double Dutch, there’s a good chance some other Double Dutchers will know her. Might be able to tell us not only her name, but why someone might have wanted to kill her.”

“Excellent, Watson,” Sherlock says, straightening and clapping his hands together. The sound is loud in the quiet morgue, and she winces as it reverberates off the walls. “Shall we?”

They find Janae Wiggins, a thirteen-year-old Double Dutch legend from the way the other girls talk about her. Janae identifies their girl as Chantelle Biggs, another Double Dutch legend from the streets and who stayed at the same homeless shelter as herself.

“She was good,” Janae says, staring at a photo of Chantelle’s face, trying to sound tough even though Joan can hear the strain in her voice. “Real good. Better’n me.”

“Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?” Sherlock asks, gentler than he normally is with potential witnesses. He is never cruel to them, is usually kind, but Janae is just a child, and Sherlock is good with kids.

Janae shrugs a shoulder. “Don’t think he wanted to hurt her, but he didn’t take no for an answer real well, so he might’ve.”

“Who?” Joan asks.

Janae looks at her, wrapping her arms around her waist and pulling her legs up on her bed. From the next bed over, her mother looks at her, worried. “Don Falls. Claims he puts together Double Dutch teams, takes ‘em big time, gets ‘em off the streets and makes ‘em rich. All of us know he be frontin’, though.”

Sherlock raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

She snorts. “Hell yeah. White boy like him, with his fancy car and three piece suits and shiny shoes that ain’t never walked a full block? What does he know about Double Dutch?”

Joan purses her lips, glancing at Sherlock. “I remember guys like that. They’d drive around different neighbourhoods and watch the girls jump rope.”

“He wants us girls for one thing only, and none of us gonna give it to him,” Janae says, raising her chin defiantly at Joan, as though she expects her to disagree. Joan holds her gaze. “He been hangin’ around Chantelle recently, but Chantelle was smart. She told him no, real loud and clear, made sure all we girls heard her, and some of the people who work at the homeless shelter too. You heard her, right, Momma?”

Mrs. Wiggins nods, her face sad and serious. Joan wonders if this is the first time detectives have spoken to Janae.

“Anyway,” Janae continues, “I thought that would do it for him, everybody knowin’ she put him down like that. Guess I was wrong.”

It comes out sad and small. Joan puts a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”

Janae shrugs again. “Whatever.”

“Do you know where we might find Mr. Falls?” Sherlock asks politely.

“He wasn’t exactly flashin’ an address around,” she says testily. “But he had some pizza boxes in his car, not from our neighbourhood. Some place called Gianelli’s. Might try around there.”

Joan smiles at her. “That’s a lot of help. We’ll find him. Thank you, Janae.”

“Sure,” she says. Sherlock stands, thanks Mrs. Wiggins for letting them speak to Janae, and heads out. Joan starts to follow him, but Janae grabs her elbow.

“You skip Double Dutch?” she asks, looking at the floor instead of her. “When you found me, you was singing along and watching the ropes just like I do.”

“I did, once,” she says, smiling, remembering the feeling of her feet hitting the pavement in perfect time with the ropes. She hasn’t skipped Double Dutch since she was eighteen and trying to pretend that she was a mature, serious college student. Sometimes she misses it.

“You come out and find me when you get Chantelle’s killer, we’ll skip some rope.”

They exchange phone numbers, and Joan promises to keep her updated on the case. She wouldn’t do that, normally, for a thirteen-year-old girl, but she likes Janae. She thanks Mrs. Wiggins one last time, and goes to find Sherlock.

“Observant girl,” Sherlock says idly, raising an eyebrow as Joan finishes putting in her contact information. “Starting to add to the Irregulars, are you?”

She rolls her eyes, imagining Teddy’s reaction to working with Janae. “She’s thirteen. She’s just a kid,” she says, which isn’t an answer at all, and flags down a cab before Sherlock can dig out his whistle.

After they arrest Don Falls, Joan texts Janae and receives an invitation in return. She laces her sneakers up, pulls her hair into a high ponytail, and prods Sherlock into stepping away from the chemistry set and into some clean clothes. They find Janae and a group of other girls turning ropes and singing songs outside of the homeless shelter, just like they found them the first time.

“Hey Ms. J!” Janae calls, jumping easily out of the ropes and waving for another girl to jump in. “You come out to show us what you got?”

“You bet,” she calls back, already watching the ropes. Sherlock makes an amused sound next to her, and she turns to look at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” he says, and at her look immediately corrects himself, saying, “It is amusing to see you regress to your childhood, that’s all.”

Joan snorts. “If you could skip Double Dutch, you’d understand.”

Sherlock watches her, a wondering look in his eyes. “Perhaps you could teach me.”

“Maybe,” she agrees, and focuses on the heat of the pavement, the lazy haze of the street, and the sound of the ropes hitting the ground in an even rhythm. She watches as Janae jumps back in, doing high kicks and laughing, looking back at Joan every now and then in a clear challenge.

“Maybe,” she says again, tearing her eyes away to offer Sherlock a cocky smile. “But first I have to go show Janae that she still has a lot to learn.”

Joan jumps in.


End file.
